Ultimate Reality

Starfarers, 41.

The magnetic field of the black hole is:

"...so intense as to be well-nigh material itself..." (p. 392)

Might some kinds of beings perceive a magnetic field as a material object?

A table seems to us to be a single stationary solid object although physicists tell us that it is really many moving particles which also, with everything else on Earth, continually revolve around the Sun, the galactic center and the center of the local group of galaxies. Might some other kind of being perceive the table as multiple and moving? And might a more fundamental level of reality underlie the many moving particles just as they underlie the apparently single solid object? A galaxy seen from afar appears as a single point of light whereas, from within, it appears as many such points each of which comprises many moving particles and quanta while each particle is energy.

Anderson's text describes "...the vacuum..." as "...ultimate reality." (p. 393) On this view, the vacuum is the most fundamental ontological level. Nothing else underlies it. Vacuum is ultimate because it contains potentialities which are actualized first as momentary virtual particles, then as longer lasting real particles.

Matter caught by the black hole's gravity gyrates in that intense magnetic field. Naked nuclei collide, fuse and become new particles. Photons split and re-merge. At the event horizon, these energies interact with the potentialities of the vacuum. Out of such processes, quantum life emerges at some black holes just as organic life emerges on some planets.

"Life is...information, a flux of patterns..." (ibid.)

Organically, carbon is the only element versatile enough to make the molecules that encode the data and conduct the processes of life. In a newly dead body, the molecules have not yet decayed although the flow of life events has ceased. Some computer programs and robots are complex and changeable enough to maybe count as alive. (Are they? Are they changing in relation to their external environment or just changing internally?) AIs are not conscious because consciousness involves an entire organism: old animal brain, central nervous system, muscles, viscera, glands, drives and instincts.

When infalling energy and matter interact with virtualities in intricate, mutable space-time, interlinked quasi-stable quantum states emerge, their intricacy becoming a set of codes that mutate because of the uncertainty principle. Natural selection generates thought which acts on its own and surrounding quantum states in "...electronic, photonic, and nuclear events." (p. 394)